Sep 15-17, 2006
Guided by the ancient African wisdom, this retreat offers the opportunity to explore their inner and outer lives through ritual, teachings, dialogue, and ceremony. Drawing on the African Dagara cosmology as a spiritual compass, we will reorient ourselves to the elemental nature of humanity and relate this to the needs we face in our culture today.
Ritual is the daily practice of staying in touch with the spirit world, with nature, with the ancestors, with ourselves and others, and with the gods. Malidoma believes the indigenous person within each of us hungers for the transcendence that ritual offers. He eloquently, vividly, and compassionately describes the catastrophic results of the lack of rituals and initiations in Western culture. “A body in pain is a soul in longing.” We need rituals to invite the spirit world to help us work through our pain. Pain awakens us to that part of ourselves we have been neglecting, and ritual offers healing and nourishment for the whole person.
One of the things we yearn for is to be connected to a tribe. In our bones, we all carry the deep memory of our tribal roots and need the life-giving process of initiation into a thriving community. In the African village, initiation helps young people recognize their inborn destinies and adult purposes. This benefits both the individual and the community.
Malidoma has much wisdom from living in a traditional culture. He speaks of tribal and transcendental experiences in down-to-earth Western terms that are nonetheless startling, original, and urgent. We will explore how rituals heal and will open ourselves to the art of designing and performing them together. We can create rituals appropriate to our own culture and begin to feel connected again.
Western civilization is suffering a great sickness of the soul. We’re microcosms of the world we inhabit, so we find the marks of this dysfunctional culture in us, but we’re also infused with the divine. Our separation is illusory and our reconnection to the healing forces of nature and of spirit is always possible. Young people aged 13 and up who want to come are welcome at half their elder’s fee.
Malidoma Somé is a fully initiated medicine man, shaman, and diviner among his own people, the Dagara in Burkina Faso of West Africa. When he was four, Malidoma was taken to the seminary for 15 years. He returned to the Dagara and underwent a harrowing month-long initiation ritual in the wilderness. His name translates loosely as `be friends with the stranger/enemy,’ and his elders sent him to bring his peoples wisdom to the West. A gifted healer, lecturer, and teacher, he holds doctorates in political science from the Sorbonne and in literature from Brandeis, but he considers his traditional initiation into ancestral knowledge his true education. His widely acclaimed books include Ritual: Power, Healing, and Community, Of Water and the Spirit, and The Healing Wisdom of Africa. He’s currently writing books about Ancestors and Gatekeepers. Malidoma travels throughout the world bringing a message of hope, healing, and reconciliation through the powerful tools of ritual and community building.
“Malidoma Somé lives his purpose with dignity, intention, and deep love. Under the direction and guidance of his own elders, he is sharing ancient wisdom that is so desperately needed as corporate greed and globalization continue to tear at our connection with mother Earth, to human family, and to the values of love, sustainability, and beauty. I count myself deeply blessed to call him teacher and friend.”
—Marian (Meck) Groot, Boston, MA
“Ritual is the greatest and most detailed book on ritual that I have ever read.” — Robert Bly